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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Another Brooklyn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss, Denial, and Grief
Friendship, Womanhood, and Support
Religion, Tradition, and Death
Racism and Classism
Summary
Analysis
August starts looking for Jennie’s children wherever she goes, curious about what has become of them. When she’s not thinking about them, she spends her summer nights going to dances in the public parks, where DJs set up their equipment and play music late into the night. On one such night, August and Jerome kiss passionately behind the wall of a handball court. Working his way down August’s body, Jerome performs oral sex on her for the first time, causing her entire body to “explode.” Directly afterwards, August thinks about Sister Loretta, realizing that she has let Jerome into the “temple” of her body. Ignoring these thoughts, though, August pushes Jerome’s head between her legs again.
It’s worth mentioning that August uses the word “explode” to describe what it feels like to receive oral sex from Jerome, since she uses the same word when talking about the experience of kissing Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. In this way, her relationships with these girls become not just vaguely related to her sex life, but a legitimate part of it. And though August almost feels guilty for doing something that so blatantly goes against the values that people like Sister Loretta and the rest of her family ascribe themselves to, she ultimately prioritizes her own experience and decides to simply enjoy sharing this intimate moment with Jerome.
Themes
August is no longer the only one with a boyfriend. In fact, all of the girls start dating boys, going with them to the park each night for the dances. Around this time, they hear that Charlsetta, the captain of the cheerleading squad at August’s school, has been “sent away.” Rumors circulate about Charlsetta’s mother kicking her out of the house, but August and the girls still aren’t quite sure what happened, so they ask Charlsetta’s brother. He tells them that Charlsetta got pregnant and that their parents sent her to live with a relative in the South. Upon hearing this, the girls start taking it slower with their boyfriends, though they wonder about how many times Charlsetta had sex and, moreover, what it felt like. As the weeks pass, they wait for Charlsetta to return, but summer turns to autumn and still she doesn’t come back.
When the girls hear about Charlsetta’s pregnancy, they reexamine their relationships with their own boyfriends, perhaps realizing for the first time that this could happen to them, too—an idea that goes against the feeling they had years ago that what happened to Gigi’s mom (who became pregnant as a young teenager) could never become their own reality. Now, it seems, they recognize that this is simply not true. In this way, hearing about Charlsetta’s pregnancy is an important moment in the girls’ transition into adulthood—a transition they are largely navigating without parental guidance.
Themes
As August becomes more and more independent, her father becomes increasingly withdrawn. Focused on his devotion to the Nation of Islam, he spends very little time with August. When they are together, he is engrossed in prayer or religious thought. Around this time, a woman is found dead on the roofs of the Marcy Houses, a nearby public housing development. Frightened, Angela tells her friends that she can’t find her mother, but August assures her that everything is all right, insisting that the dead woman surely isn’t Angela’s mother. As August soothes Angela in this way, Sylvia and Gigi step back, unable to back her up when she maintains that Angela’s mother is probably fine. And yet, the dead woman does turn out to be Angela’s mother.
August finds herself capable of comforting Angela because she knows what it’s like to lose a mother. More importantly, though, she knows how to remain fiercely optimistic even when a situation doesn’t necessarily call for optimism, since she herself has been denying her mother’s death for years at this point. With this in mind, she tries to convince Angela that her mother will be fine and, in doing so, perhaps tries to redouble her commitment to the idea that her own mother is fine, too.
Themes
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Before everyone discovers that Angela’s mother is dead, Angela stays for three nights at August’s apartment. In this time, August tries to comfort her, but this becomes impossible when the truth of the situation emerges. Thinking about Angela’s mother, August has a sudden memory of her own mother lying stiffly on a bed, a Bible held to her chest and her hands disconcertingly still as her father kisses her goodbye—an image August has suppressed for many years and once more forces herself to push away. Instead, August focuses on the realization that she once saw Angela’s mother, whom she pieces together was the drug addict who walked by the girls on the day Angela abruptly stopped dancing in the street. “She’s not dead, Angela,” August says. “They have the wrong person.” But Angela doesn’t listen to her, instead withdrawing from her and the other girls.
In this moment, Angela’s unwillingness to talk about her home life becomes a bit easier to understand, since it emerges that her mother was a drug addict. Rather than talking about this with her friends, though, Angela has chosen to keep it a secret, struggling silently with the difficulty of living with an unstable parent. More importantly, though, readers learn in this section that August knows and has always known that her mother is dead, but she has forced herself to deny this. In keeping with this, she distracts herself from this memory by trying to get Angela to—like her—deny reality, since this would perhaps make it easier for August herself to continue believing that her own mother is still alive.
Themes
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August and her friends don’t know where to look for Angela because they’ve never been to her apartment. When they go to the building that Angela once said she lived in, they learn that she never really lived there at all. They then try to call her, but her telephone has been disconnected. Meanwhile, August tells Sylvia and Gigi that the authorities must have gotten the wrong woman, upholding that Angela’s mother isn’t dead. “Believe me,” she says. “I know.”
Angela’s sudden disappearance in the aftermath of her mother’s death is the first rupture in the friend group, which has otherwise managed to remain so tight-knit over the years. Once again, then, Woodson intimates that there are certain limits to friendship, since particularly difficult circumstances can make it harder for people to stay in touch. On another note, August once again demonstrates her unwillingness to accept reality, ultimately projecting her insecurities about her own mother onto Angela’s situation.
Themes
In recent years, August’s brother has grown up considerably. Tall and conscientious, he is now a devoted member of the Nation of Islam who takes his religious faith very seriously. One night, he shakes August awake and tells her that she has been wrong to think for all these years that their mother will come back. “She won’t be coming back until the resurrection,” he says.
Unlike August, her brother doesn’t need to delude himself that their mother is still alive, since he has something else he can depend upon: religion. In the face of tragedy and uncertainty, he has turned to the Nation of Islam, finding solace in religious faith and the community it has given him. Finding herself unable to embrace the same things, though, August finds herself at a loss and, consequently, continues to deny that her mother is most likely dead.
Themes
After Clyde died, August’s mother started vanishing for stretches of time. She also stopped doing any kind of cooking, so August and her brother often found themselves having to scavenge in the yard for berries until their father came home with ready-made meals from the grocery store. Thinking about this, August remembers the conversation she had with her father about the contents of the urn and then she remembers that SweetGrove brushed up against a body of water. “Don’t wade in the water, children,” she thinks to herself. “Your mama’s done troubled the water.” Thinking these words, August wonders if perhaps her mother forgot that the family’s land ended in water—maybe, she thinks, her mother forgot and simply continued walking into the water.
August’s thoughts about wading into water are taken from an old spiritual song called “Wade in the Water.” What’s most significant about this moment is that she seems to be on the verge of acknowledging that her mother is dead, since she insinuates that her mother walked into the water—or, to put it more straightforwardly, drowned. And yet, August doesn’t fully admit this to herself, instead cryptically quoting “Wade in the Water” without letting herself completely acknowledge that her mother committed suicide.
Themes
